You think record execs are bad, publishers are much worse, kinda like movie executives on steroids, people who believe they’re better than us. And I’m not going to laud the uneducated, but the publishing world is everything I hate about New York, where your pedigree rules and it’s all about keeping everybody else down. Come on, have you seen Donald Trump’s act?

Books are so passe it’s laughable. And so many are written by graduates of writing workshops where the standard is unreadability. It’s like they pack their tomes with words you have to look up to make them feel better about themselves. Whereas the first criterion of a book is readability.

The story unfolded as a serial over the course of several years. At the request of fans, Weir repackaged it in an e-reader version. Some readers struggled with the downloading process, so Weir then put it on sale at Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing, charging the required minimum of 99 cents per copy. More people downloaded it at that price than had ever downloaded it for free. They gave it positive reviews.

Not a single damn person in my bookish Twitterstream ever mentioned it to me.

And you would think Amazon would have pimped the shit out of it. They fell down on this job!

This stands in stark contrast to a piece that ran a few days ago on the Atlantic by Olga Khazan called Can Mommy Bloggers Still Make a Living? that showed CPMs circling the drain at an alarming rate. One mommy blogger who once made enough to support three people and pay for an assistant has now all but moved on[.]

And:

I know I’ve said this before — just a few days ago in fact — but without my own Patreon campaign I couldn’t even keep this site running. For some insane reason, I live in NYC, where working two jobs 14 hours a day to pay for a room in an apartment with three other people living in it is pretty common. A 260-sq. foot apartment built from Legos in the middle of a park full of homeless people across the street from a mental hospital rents for $2000 a month here. (This is a block from Stately Beat Manor, BTW.)